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This paper analyzes how the implementation of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) household registration (hukou) system in the 1950s has created material resource disparities between the urban and rural sectors that have persisted in the market reform economy. It examines hukou founding documents, urban population management laws, and pilot solutions to address structural inequities. It concludes with an analysis of current provincial and national government solutions seeking to bridge the rural-urban economic gap, notably the need to reform the hukou instrument to increase equitability and social stability. Although previous scholars have linked the PRC's household registration laws to its socialist modernization economic platform, this project contributes to the field by linking that body of research with current scholarship on present-day welfare inequities in the Chinese state.

The globalization of business activity: whether you love it or hate it, it affects you. What causes it, how different countries deal with it, and what the future might hold for it are all key questions which The Global Environment of Business answers.

Book synopsis: "The robots are taking our jobs!" Not long ago, this worry was the stuff of science fiction. Now, as self–driving cars take to the streets and robots fill our warehouses and factories, it is entering mainstream political debate around the world. This raises important questions for all of us. How society uses new technologies is not a foregone conclusion. It depends on political decisions, cultural norms and economic choices as much as on the technologies themselves. This book looks at the phenomenon of new robot technologies, asks what impact they might have on the economy, and considers how governments, businesses and individuals should respond to them. Because technological change is a complex business, it includes views from a range of disciplines, including economics, engineering, history, philosophy and innovation studies.

High involvement work practices (HIWPs) may empower employees to do their jobs better, and also empower them at the bargaining table. This paper considers whether non‐universal adoption of productivity‐enhancing work practices may, at least in part, be explained by this dual nature of empowerment. It examines the case of a customer service programme in the Northern California division of Safeway stores, its affect on the outcome of a strike against Safeway, and the subsequent pattern of adoption (and non‐adoption) of similar programmes among Safeway's competitors. It concludes that the dual nature of empowerment can help explain the apparent paradox posed by empirical studies; that although HIWPs improve the performance of all sorts of organisations, most organisations do not adopt HIWPs.

Technology can affect the distribution of income directly via its influence on both the bargaining power of different parties and the marginal product of different factors of production. This paper focuses mainly on the first route. The role of power is transparent in the case of medieval choke points but modern network technologies have similar features. There is also substantial evidence -- from truckers and retail clerks to CEOs -- that power affects the determination of wages. But power relations inevitably have institutional dimensions; regulatory frameworks influence industry structures and the market power of large companies as well as the parameters that determine the earnings of different groups of workers. The institutional framework is arrived at through complex social and political processes; technology, however, may exert some influence on the course of those processes.

We propose an explanation for the growth of executive pay since the 1980s. New information and communication technologies (ICTs) appear to favor winner-take-all markets and to accentuate firm-level volatility of profits. We show, using an efficiency wage model, that these changes lead to higher executive pay. This is an example of what we have called, in other contexts, power-biased technological change (PBTC). The changes in market structure and the power of CEOs, however, are not only technologically but also institutionally contingent. JEL Classification: D31, J41, O33

We consider the links between Information and Communications
Technologies (ICTs) and the distribution of income, as mediated by
problems of coordination and control within organizations. In the large
corporations of the mid-twentieth century, a highly developed division
of labor was coordinated and controlled with the aid of relatively underdeveloped
ICTs. This created a situation in which the options of
top management were constrained while the individual and collective
power of lower-paid workers was enhanced. Only in the late twentieth
century, when the microprocessor and related technologies transformed
the information systems of organizations, did improvements
in the tools of coordination and control race ahead of the growing demands
of coordination and control. These technological changes have
reduced the power of lower-paid employees, increased that for higherpaid
employees, and led to an increase in income inequality. Thus, the
more important aspects of new technology relate to the 'power-bias',
rather than to the 'skill-bias', of technological change.

AbstractThe overall rise in inequality in the USA since 1980 has been matched by a rise in inequality between places; local and regional development policies aimed at reversing this polarisation have seen limited success. We propose an explanation for the spatial polarisation of prosperity and the failure of the policies to remedy it. Our explanation is based on the interaction of monopoly power, agglomeration economies in technology clusters and the power of financial sector actors over non-financial firms—all phenomena characteristic of the post-1980 economy. We review evidence for each of these elements and propose some causal relationships between them, as an outline of an ongoing research programme.